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    The Life of William Apess, Pequot
    The Life of William Apess, Pequot
    The Life of William Apess, Pequot
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    The Life of William Apess, Pequot

    By Charles Deutsch

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    The Pequot Indian intellectual, author, and itinerant preacher William Apess (1798–1839) was one the most important voices of the nineteenth century. Here, Philip F. Gura offers the first book-length chronicle of Apess's fascinating and consequential life. After an impoverished childhood marked by abuse, Apess soldiered with American troops during the War of 1812, converted to Methodism, and rose to fame as a lecturer who lifted a powerful voice of protest against the plight of Native Americans in New England and beyond. His 1829 autobiography, A Son of the Forest, stands as the first published by a Native American writer. Placing Apess's activism on behalf of Native American people in the context of the era's rising tide of abolitionism, Gura argues that this founding figure of Native intellectual history deserves greater recognition in the pantheon of antebellum reformers. Following Apess from his early life through the development of his political radicalism to his tragic early death and enduring legacy, this much-needed biography showcases the accomplishments of an extraordinary Native American.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateMar 2, 2015
    ISBN9781469619996
    The Life of William Apess, Pequot
    Author

    Charles Deutsch

    PHILIP F. GURA is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His many books include Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel and American Transcendentalism: A History, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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      The Life of William Apess, Pequot - Charles Deutsch

      One: Cruel Beginnings {1798–1812}

      PEQUOT HISTORY AND CULTURE

      On the first page of A Son of the Forest, written when he was thirty-one, William Apess proudly claimed that he was a descendant of one of the principal chiefs of the Pequod tribe, so well known in that part of American history called King Philip’s Wars.¹ By 1800, the Pequots were a remnant—numbering no more than a few hundred—of a population originally centered in southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island. Almost from the beginning of European settlement in these regions, the Pequots’ relations with the newcomers had been antagonistic, with altercations breaking out particularly frequently over access to or appropriation of traditional hunting and fishing grounds. In 1637, the Massachusetts Bay Puritans finally waged outright war against them and, in a surprise nighttime attack on their fortified encampment near present-day Mystic, Connecticut, massacred several hundred, including many women and children.²

      This was a decisive blow; most survivors of the Pequot War drifted west or north to seek survival among other Native peoples. Moreover, the Puritans’ subsequent actions even amounted to an attempt at cultural genocide, for by the terms of a treaty at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1638, they remanded the remaining approximately 200 Pequots to the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes, forbade them ever from identifying themselves with the name Pequot, and forcibly incorporated their lands into the colony of Connecticut.³

      But by the late eighteenth century, the remaining Pequots persisted in two locations in what had become the state of Connecticut: on colony-granted lands in Groton (a group later known as the Mashantucket Pequots) and across the Mystic River in adjacent Stonington (later, the Eastern Pequots). On tribal reserves established by Connecticut as early as 1666 (the acts themselves giving the lie to the Natives’ putative extinction), only footpaths connected domiciles, and no colony roads passed through, lending the area an aura of isolation.⁴ Seasonally, following tribal patterns set for hundreds of years, the surviving Pequots moved among these two locations and other little-settled areas, following river bottoms to fish and hunt and harvest wild foodstuffs. As resources on the reserves grew scarce, some Natives traveled seasonally to lands further to the north and west, where white settlement pressed in less. Still others moved near or into white communities and worked at low-paying tasks, eventually becoming part of the region’s emerging multiracial working class even as they maintained their tribal identity.

      In their habits and general appearance, surviving Pequots were increasingly inconspicuous. Many dressed in English-style clothing and by the early nineteenth century lived in small huts or houses, as well as in traditional wigwams. Their diet combined English and Native foodstuffs. Most commonly they stewed food rather than roasted it, and they threw into their pots a variety of stock: deer, sheep, pigs, raccoons, dogs, clams and mussels, and both freshwater and saltwater fish. Maize, oats, peas, potatoes, and squash were their common vegetables.⁵

      What most distinguished these people from Europeans and their American descendants, however, were their attitudes toward work and the land. Given the Pequots’ wish to continue to hunt and forage seasonally, to Euro-Americans they appeared transient and unreliable, which the former attributed to an inherent laziness. Moreover, on their reserves, the Natives practiced tenancy in common. Even though proprietors—those born into the tribe—could cultivate and build on sections of the lands and pass on any improvements to their children, the tribe itself retained overall stewardship of the parcels. Any member, though, could use unclaimed lands for pasturage, wood gathering, hunting and fishing, or harvesting shellfish, but it was understood that the natural world was a common inheritance not to be permanently parceled among individuals.⁶

      Pequot women frequently remained on the allotted lands while their husbands periodically moved to hunt, fish, or find work for wages. Labor for others (this meant for whites) became increasingly common as the Pequots, like Native people throughout New England, depended more and more on manufactured clothing and other store goods for which they could pay cash as well as barter.⁷ Thus, after the turn of the nineteenth century, the Pequots were inexorably pulled into the market economy that now defined nineteenth-century New England, even as they struggled to retain elements of traditional lifeways.⁸ Attempts to maintain cultural and political independence, however, were made more difficult, because, unlike the Cherokees or Seminoles, who argued their sovereignty on the grounds of the federal government’s treaty relations with them, the Pequots (and other New England tribes) used their common culture to support claims to sovereignty.⁹

      COLRAIN

      William Apess was not born on one of the Pequot reserves established in the colonial period but in the northwestern Massachusetts town of Coleraine (now Colrain), in Franklin County (which until 1813 made up the northern tier of Hampshire County). For good reason, Franklin County is described as part of the state’s hill country, for almost every town within it, with the exception of a few along the Connecticut River, which bisects it, has considerable heights of land surrounded by boulder-strewn fields, geological markers that the retreat of glaciers left 10,000 years ago. The oldest towns in the county are Deerfield and Sunderland, in Franklin County’s south-central region, along the Connecticut River, where rich alluvial soil lent itself to agriculture and pasturage for cattle. By the eighteenth century, residents had grown wealthy by shipping surplus grain and livestock downriver through Northampton, Springfield, and Hartford, to Long Island Sound, and then to New York City. With more difficulty, they also drove goods and cattle eastward, along the Bay Path through Worcester to Boston and its surrounding towns. Subsequent economic development in the region followed the Connecticut River northward to Northfield, or it followed one of its tributaries—the more turbulent Deerfield River, west, from Greenfield, or another, the Millers River, east. The last part of the county to be settled was the mountainous northern region bordering Vermont and making up the present-day towns of Leyden, Heath, Rowe, Monroe, and Colrain.¹⁰

      By the mid-eighteenth century, as economic opportunities became scarcer in Hampshire County’s older towns, ambitious and impatient residents, facing either very high prices for available land or a long wait to inherit it, began to settle this remote region near the Vermont border, in a section watered by the Green River on the east and two branches of the North River, a tributary of the powerful Deerfield River, in which salmon still ran. Clearing the land for farming and pasturing, the first settlers also marketed lumber and cordwood, maple sugar, and (eventually) livestock and sheep to generate extra income.

      This area was first known as Boston Township No. 2, because it was made up of lands granted to some of Boston’s residents after they had successfully petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for compensation for the town’s regularly paying a fifth of the entire colony’s taxes and providing more than its share of support for the entire state’s poor. The settlement eventually became the town of Colrain. Adventurous speculators and new emigrants from the Irish province of Ulster (known as Scots-Irish—hence the town’s name, after the Irish Lord Coleraine) found the region more suitable to agriculture than some of the other uplands. They brought in a Presbyterian clergyman as early as 1750, and by 1786 there were enough new residents to support two Baptist congregations as well. In 1800, the Troy (New York) Conference of Methodists sent missionaries to neighboring Rowe and two years later established a class of a dozen or so believers on Catamount Hill, one of the more remote and less settled regions of Colrain where the North River cuts through a steep, narrow gorge. This spot became a regular stop on the Methodist circuit.¹¹

      In this hardscrabble environment, economic success did not come quickly or easily. In the eighteenth century, raids by Native Americans remained common, with several townspeople killed or taken into captivity in the decades immediately after settlement. During the American phase of the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) against the French and the Indians, some inhabitants joined the fabled Roger’s Rangers and saw action at the Battle of Quebec. Shortly after the end of those hostilities, emigrants from the east and down along the Connecticut River flooded into the area, so that by the end of the 1760s Colrain had about ninety farms. In the inflationary years in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, though, many of these pioneers (like others in western Massachusetts) fell into debt and lent support to Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87), centered in Hampshire and Berkshire Counties, thirty miles away. Economic recovery was slow, and the ranks of the town’s poor increased when African Americans, whom some of the settlers had brought to the area as slaves before the Revolution but whom state law had freed in 1783, remained in the area, forming the nucleus of an interracial community that eventually included Apess’s parents.¹²

      EARLY YEARS

      Tracing William Apess’s genealogy is difficult, for records of Native Americans—and of people of color generally—from this period often are fragmentary or lost. Apess heard his grandmother describe his grandfather William Apes as a white man who married a female attached to the royal family (that is, King Philip’s), but to what degree of affinity Apess did not know (8).¹³ Extant records suggest that this William Apes was born around 1730 in Stonington, Connecticut, married a woman named Jerusha Maria, and served on the British side in the French and Indian War; he died sometime after 1814 in Colchester, Connecticut.¹⁴

      Apess’s father, William Apes (b. 1770), from Colchester, Connecticut, was thus of mixed descent, but by his son’s account, he always strongly identified with the Pequots. As soon as he attained sufficient age to act for himself, Apess remembered, his father (as was typical in the Natives’ matrilineal kinship system) joined the tribe to which he was connected through his mother, in whose veins not a single drop of the white man’s blood had ever flowed (9). Apes worked as a servant to Captain Joseph Taylor in Colchester and married Candace Taylor (b. ca. 1777), one of Joseph Taylor’s freed slaves, of mixed African and Native blood. Candace, however, probably was not Apess’s mother because Joseph Taylor did not free her (as he did with two others, all referred to as Negro slaves or blacks) until 1805, when she was twenty-eight. It is unlikely that she was in another state with William Apes for the birth of Apess and at least one other sibling, an infant brother who died in Colrain of dysentery in an epidemic in 1803.¹⁵

      With Candace, and living in the Colchester area, William Apes had three sons, Elias, Griswold, and Gilbert, whose descendants were termed coloured, mulatto, or black.¹⁶ At some point before May 1815, Candace had moved to Hartford, where she died in 1838. With a probable third wife, Mary, William Apes had Elisha, born in May 1815 in Groton, Connecticut; Solomon, born in 1818 in Preston, Connecticut; Leonard, born in 1820 but dying within a year; Abby Ann, born in Colrain, Massachusetts, in 1822; Sally George, born in Colrain in 1823; and a second Leonard, born in Leyden, Massachusetts, in 1824. These children are recorded as either Indian or white, but never as mulatto or black. In 1820, when the family was living in Colrain, the U.S. census counted all of them as white. As this fragmentary genealogy suggests, in this period, racial categories in New England were very imprecise and fluid, probably dependent to some degree on the predispositions and preconceptions of individual census takers.¹⁷

      By the late 1820s, Apes and his family had returned to southeastern Connecticut, where three of William and Mary’s sons became whalemen.¹⁸ The family’s frequent movements suggest that Apess’s parents, particularly his father, maintained a peripatetic lifestyle, typical of Native Americans in that period. My parents were of the same disposition of the Indians, Apess later wrote (with an odd locution), that is, to wander to and fro. William Apes had so much Native blood, Apess continued, that when he moved, he even fashioned after them [the Indians] in traveling from river to river, and from mountain to mountain and plain to plain, rather than following the white man’s roads.¹⁹ Apess himself never totally embraced this lifestyle but did follow it somewhat in his future labors as an itinerant preacher.

      One of William Apes’s moves took him to Colereign, in the back settlements, where he remained for some time and where Apess was born, on January 31, 1798. The little we know of his few years in Colrain comes from his autobiography. The family lived on the steep slopes of Catamount Hill, on the outskirts of town, where most newcomers had settled after the Revolutionary War. Like other mixed-race inhabitants of New England, his father may have hired out to work on a local farm; he also made shoes, a craft he later taught his son. William Apes also very likely hunted, fished, and grew subsistence crops on the outskirts of town, where, Apess said, they lived in a tent (9).

      We know little else of the physical conditions in which the family or their neighbors dwelled; but Yale president Timothy Dwight, who traveled extensively throughout New England and New York in the first decade of the nineteenth century, offered insight into contemporary housing for the region’s indigenous people. He visited an area called Lanthern Hill in a remote part of Stonington, Connecticut, on the Pequot lands where Apess’s grandfather had lived. Some of them lived in wigwams, Dwight observed, and others in houses resembling poor cottages, at the best small, ragged, and unhealthy. Still others lived on the farms of the white inhabitants in houses purposely built for them, and pa[id] their rent by daily labor.²⁰ Recent archaeology in this Lanthern Hill area has uncovered the foundations of sweathouses and animal pens, and also indications of cornfields and gardens, wells, storage facilities, stone walls, middens, and cemeteries.²¹

      Dwight unfortunately has nothing to say of the language and customs the Pequots might have preserved, though, and his overall portrait is decidedly negative, informed as it is by white Americans’ increasing sense that Natives in New England were a degenerate race whose time was passing.²² All the energy of the original Pequot warriors had vanished, he continued, leaving in its place what he regarded as laziness and prodigality. The people, for example, quickly squandered their wages on ardent spirits or cider, for which they would part with everything they possess. The tribes’ seeming lack of familial responsibility similarly chagrined Dwight. Presumably unaware that Pequot men periodically left their spouses in charge of the homes and farms while they traveled to traditional hunting and fishing grounds, he deplored that they seemed to have no such thing among them as marriage, but cohabit[ed] without ceremony or covenant, and desert[ed] each other at pleasure.²³

      COLCHESTER

      The Apes family remained in Colrain for only a few years. When Apess was just a few years old, his father moved the family to Colchester, Connecticut, twenty-three miles southeast of Hartford and the same distance north of New London at the mouth of the Thames River on Long Island Sound.²⁴ Colchester was an uneven, hilly township with fairly rich soil and a large and lucrative deposit of iron ore. Wigwam Hill, one of its neighborhoods, was home to a small Native population. The town also boasted well-regarded Bacon Academy, established in 1805 through the generosity of town resident Pierpont Brown. Children of members of the local Congregational Church attended the school free of charge, and it also welcomed students from throughout the region, who boarded with local families. At the time the Apes family moved to Colchester, it was best known for its iron ore and this academy.²⁵

      Colchester also had a significant number of slave children, who, according to the Gradual Abolition Act of 1784, were to be freed when they were twenty-one; town officials wanted to ensure their literacy and funded an institution, which they founded a few years prior to Bacon Academy, where they could be educated. Thus, on the town common adjacent to the academy was a more modest building that was home to the only school in the state specifically earmarked for colored children. When the Apes family moved to town, the school already had about thirty students, who were taught by Prince Saunders, a colored man who was beginning what became an extraordinary career as an educator.

      Saunders was born in 1775 in nearby Lebanon, Connecticut; he taught at the colored school and at the same time received instruction in Latin and Greek at the academy. He, too, may have been of mixed African and Native blood, for in 1807 he left Colchester to attend Moor’s Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire, affiliated with Dartmouth College and founded expressly for Native American students who wished to become missionaries.²⁶

      Saunders stayed at Moor’s Charity School for two years, long enough to impress Dartmouth’s president, John Wheelock, who put him in touch with prominent Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing, a strong supporter of a Boston school established for the elevation of the colored people.²⁷ In 1809, Channing hired Saunders to teach students primarily from the tumbled down tenements on Nigger Hill behind the Massachusetts State House. He taught there for four years in rooms in the African Meetinghouse made available by the Reverend Thomas Paul, founder of Boston’s black Baptist Church.²⁸

      In Boston, Saunders entered fully into the social and intellectual life of a sizable community of free blacks. He joined the city’s African Masonic lodge, served as its secretary, and in 1815 traveled to London as a representative of the Negro Masons of America. There Saunders met British abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson and with the former’s recommendation in hand, traveled to the recently established country of Haiti—the first independent nation in Latin America, the first postcolonial independent black-led one in the world, and the only one whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion—to offer his services to its then-emperor, Henri Christophe.²⁹ Impressed by Saunders’s intelligence and regarding him a fit representative of Haiti’s political experiment, Christophe named Saunders his personal courier to London. The emperor also charged him with the reorganization of Haiti’s school system, a task Saunders undertook with his usual enthusiasm for education.³⁰

      As it happened, Apess received his first formal schooling from this soon-to-be prominent figure in New World African American history.³¹ But despite such unusual opportunity for people of color as Colchester offered, Apess’s life in Colchester was difficult. For example, although his family remained together in comparative comfort for a few years, it then began to splinter (9). His parents separated, his father returning to Colrain. In 1811 (probably after he had started a new family), William Apes sold thirteen acres of land in Colchester to Daniel Taylor, the neighbor of Candace’s former owner.³² Through these family changes, Apess was left behind; he did not see his mother’s face for the next twenty years.³³ He and his siblings lived with his mother’s parents in one-half of a house; an uncle, likely Lemuel Ashbo, lived on the other side of the building.³⁴

      The children had little to eat and were clothed literally in rags, so far as rags would suffice to cover our nakedness. They often went to bed hungry or having eaten at most a cold potato, and they slept on a bundle of straw without covering against the weather. Occasionally, Apess recalled, charitable white neighbors brought frozen milk, thawed to make porridge that the children would lap down . . . like so many hungry dogs. On one occasion, during a heavy rain, his grandmother told the children to go into the cellar and, when they complained of cold and hunger, told them to dance to keep warm. Psychologically and materially bereft, Apess and his siblings lived this way for some time (10–11).

      Following a pattern common among New England tribes, Apess’s parents wove baskets to support their family, a craft his maternal grandparents also practiced so that they could exchange them for those things absolutely necessary to keep soul and body in a state of unity, even as they withheld such comfort from their charges (10). By the early nineteenth century, as settlers progressively took control of lands that the region’s tribes had used seasonally for agriculture, hunting, and fishing, basket making and other weaving from local reeds and rushes constituted a common way for Native people to supplement their incomes. In a new, increasingly interconnected marketplace, a traditional craft like basket making assumed new significance, particularly because of easy access to the necessary raw materials—willow, wood splint, rushes, cornhusks, cattails, and sweet flag—none of whose harvest required land ownership.³⁵

      Many nineteenth-century town historians testified to the ubiquity of such activities as Native American families supplied local and regional needs for food containers and other such commodities as straw brooms and cane bottoms for chairs. One local historian described Anne Wampy, a Pequot from Ledyard, Connecticut, as carrying upon her shoulders a bundle of baskets so large as almost to hide her from view. Because her craft was so highly regarded, she found customers at almost every home.³⁶ Native artisans made circuits—Wampy traveled a circuit of a dozen or twenty miles—through various communities, staying with other Native people on state reserves or at the edges of settlements, becoming part of what the authorities called the region’s wandering poor.³⁷

      ABUSE AND RESCUE

      Parental abandonment was not the worst of Apess’s worries. Apess and his siblings endured heart-breaking abuse. One incident from Apess’s autobiography is especially haunting and marked him for life. On what proved to be the final occasion before his rescue from his grandmother’s home, in her stupor and self-loathing she asked the young boy if he hated her. The young Apess did not know what the word meant and, wishing to please her, responded affirmatively. Thereupon she began to beat him with a club, asked the same question again and again, and when he innocently answered the same way, continued to strike him, the scores of years of pent-up rage from hearing others direct the word at her exploding against the young boy’s body. When his Uncle Ashbo tried to intervene, Apess’s grandfather attacked him with a firebrand, but he finally succeeded in securing and hiding the child.

      This horrific episode likely happened in 1802, for that year the town reimbursed Ashbo for caring for Apess for ten days.³⁸ On February 18, 1802, a charitable white neighbor, David Furman, a cooper (barrelmaker), encountered the boy, his arm broken in three places and his body covered in bruises from the beating, and took him to Laban Gates, a local doctor, whom the town later paid for reducing the fractured arm of William, an Indian boy (12–13).³⁹ Shocked at what the child had experienced and having no children of his own, Furman subsequently applied to Colchester’s selectmen to have Apess and his siblings removed from their grandparents’ home and put under his family’s protection. The town fathers granted the request, and, as was the custom in New England communities in dealing with the indigent or incapacitated, Colchester periodically reimbursed the Furmans for their expenses.⁴⁰

      Apess’s foster family was devoutly Christian. Mrs. Furman was a close order Baptist—that is, one who strictly adhered to church doctrine and discipline—neighbors considered her very pious(17–18). She and her husband treated Apess as tenderly as though he had been one of the elect, not only just one of their sons. After a year that brought him much-needed stability, they had become so fond of the boy that they requested to have him formally bound out to them, to work on their farm until he was twenty-one, in exchange for room and board, clothing, and schooling (13). Settled in his new home, from the age of six Apess began to attend the nearby colored school and stayed for six successive winters, that is, during the season when boys had the most free time from farm-work. During this time, he acquired all the formal instruction he was ever to have. For three of these years Prince Saunders was his teacher (15–16).

      Living with the Furmans, Apess entered an extensive and varied pauper apprentice system through which post-Revolutionary New Englanders assisted children with special and long-term needs.⁴¹ Before the proliferation of public institutions like orphanages, asylums, special schools for the deaf and blind, and almshouses, communities cobbled together necessary assistance

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